DAMASCUS UNMASKED
Special to The Globe and Mail
By Rob Howatson

Syria's cash-strapped, censor-whipped film industry produces only a handful of features each year, but many cineastes consider the quality of these pictures to be disproportionately high.

New York's Lincoln Film Center, for instance, describes the Damascus scene as Arab cinema's best-kept secret.

For the next six days, Vancouverites can get a rare peek at what all the fuss is about as Pacific Cinematheque presents The Road to Damascus: Discovering Syrian Cinema.
Eight of the nine films in this retrospective are being shown here for the first time -- and one of the titles, Stars in Broad Daylight (1988), is too politically hot to be publicly screened in its home country.

The reason Syrian filmmakers excel at their craft may be that a lot of them trained at VGIK, the reputable Moscow film school known for carefully composed, iconographic shots.

This would explain the beautiful look of Oussama Mohammad's 2002 flirtation with magic realism, Sacrifices.

No matter how earthy his bizarre farm characters get -- ever seen an egg finger-coaxed from a hen's oviduct? -- the cinematography sizzles.

Mohammad Malas's Dreams of the City (1983) is far less stylized, and far more political as it examines life in fifties, coup-laden Syria from the perspective of a boy trying to defend his recently widowed mother.

Allegory and mayhem rule in these eastern Mediterranean stories. Catch them before the next regime change.

The Road to Damascus: Discovering Syrian Cinema continues until July 13 at the Pacific Cinematheque, 1131 Howe St., 604-688-3456, http://www.cinematheque.bc.ca.

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